I grew up on a beach in an island called Tasmania, a beautiful place.
It gave me the opportunity to meet and interact with incredible creatures,
and it was where I developed a deep connectivity with the ocean.
Now, Tasmania is one of the most beautiful islands on the planet.
But 30 years ago, the city I grew up in had a terrible problem.
The ocean was polluted with the outfall from heavy industry.
There was a pulp and paper mill,
a paint pigment plant and a slaughterhouse among them.
These were causing rashes on the bodies of swimmers and surfers,
and when you got out of the water, you had sore red eyes.
Burnie, at that time,
had one of the highest incidence of cancer in Australia.
Following the lead of three generations of journalists in my family,
I made it my investigative mission to uncover
whether these industries were, in fact, responsible
for the illnesses we were seeing
and also the poor state of the ecosystem along the coastline.
So, I got a laboratory to test the waters around Burnie,
and they found that the outfall from the pulp and paper mill
contained organic chlorines.
And these had dangerous cancer-causing dioxins.
So, I put these findings to the state government
and the minister for the environment,
and he admitted for the first time
that they knew about these organic chlorines and these dioxins
and that they were dangerous, but they hadn't informed the public.
So, I published my stories in the local newspaper,
and it caused a storm of protest across Australia.
National papers declared Burnie "Australia's dirtiest city."
I wasn't very popular with our local tourism authority, I can tell you.
I was 20 years of age at the time.
Shortly after those stories were published,
the industries started to close down,
and today, Burnie has some of the bluest water along the coastline,
and the fish have returned to the waters around the city.
I learned then about the power of the media.
Now, as I developed my skills in the media
through newspapers, radio and television,
I also developed a passion for film.
Film gave me the ability to tell stories and to make documentaries
that gave voice to silent creatures like the worms from my childhood.
But I also had a deep love
for a particular species that had consumed my time as a child,
and that was the blue whale, an immense creature,
also incredibly shy.
An opportunity came to film a documentary off the south coast of Sri Lanka.
It was the culmination, for me, of a life's dream.
Now, blue whales are the biggest animals ever to have lived.
They're bigger than any dinosaur.
They grow up to about 37 meters long.
They have a heart as big as a car.
But they were hunted almost to extinction,
and as a result, they're extremely elusive.
Trying to find them is like trying to find a needle in a massive haystack.
We went up and down the coastline of Sri Lanka for weeks on end,
searching for these whales.
We would see a spout in the distance, we'd head towards it.
We would get our cameras into our underwater housings.
We'd get our teams into the water, we'd move towards the whales,
and then we would never see them again.
And this happened day after day after day after day.
And if you want to know what it's like to go crazy,
look out into an open ocean, empty open ocean
for day after day after day after day.
That's where coffee became a big friend of mine.
So, we searched near an underwater seamount,
and this is where krill gather
because they're brought in by the currents.
And we knew the whales would head there because they eat krill.
We didn't find whales.
What we found was something very significant.
It was a floating landfill of plastic.
This was a massive slick of detritus as far as the eye could see.
It contained old fishing nets, bait boxes, plastic bottles, used lighters,
even unopened biscuits - the wastage of humanity.
It was absolutely dreadful.
It was the sign of a coming tragedy.
We didn't know that at the time.
We kept looking for the whales for three weeks,
and our time finally ran out.
We had to head back to port because our visas were about to expire.
But I'm an incredibly stubborn individual,
and I hadn't come this far and worked this hard to give up this easily,
so I refused to allow the cameras to be packed away.
I refused to allow the dive tanks to be put under the boat.
I was going to exhaust every possible moment we had on the water.
Now, when someone yells "Whale," your adrenaline really spikes.
Someone yelled "Whale," and my adrenaline shot through the roof.
There, 100 meters off our bow, was a spout -
(Splashing sound)
high and very visible.
We cut the motors on the boat,
we put the dive teams in the water,
and the cameras, and I got in with the crews,
and we slowly finned over towards what was a pot of whales.
And as we got closer, we realized this was a family of eight,
and in this family of eight whales was a juvenile.
And when I say "juvenile," he was 15 meters long.
And he was as curious of us as we were of him,
and with the big flick of his tail, he dived incredibly deep and out of sight,
and then, moments later, he came up right between our cameras,
and we had, for the first time,
footage, under water, on cinematic cameras,
of a juvenile blue whale.
It was a profound moment for us.
As we were heading back to port and I was reflecting on the shoot,
I realized that these whales were resting and probably feeding
right near where we had filmed this floating landfill of plastic.
Now, whales, when they feed - blue whales - they open their mouths,
they suck in thousands of liters of water, and they expel that water,
leaving behind the krill in their baleen, or their teeth.
But whales can't tell the difference between krill and plastic.
The Sri Lankan expedition was the start of an epic quest for us,
but it posed more questions than it answered:
If whales were consuming plastic
in a pristine environment like the Indian Ocean,
what was happening to marine life in oceans in other parts of the planet?
And if as we'd found out that 350 million tons of plastic were being made that year,
how much of that was ending up in the oceans?
And if marine life in oceans around the world were consuming plastic,
and we're at the top of the food chain,
what did that mean for human health?
Well, we gathered teams and crews and scientists,
and we traveled for four years around the globe to 20 different locations
to answer these questions for our film "A Plastic Ocean."
Our investigation was relentless.
For example, we found that 70% of plastic sinks.
Now, what we'd seen then was just the tip of the iceberg,
so we hired a research vessel and two submarines,
and we went to the Mediterranean,
and we traveled to the bottom of the Mediterranean,
1,600 meters below the surface,
to see what happened to plastic in the absence of light,
in the absence of oxygen.
We traveled thousands of kilometers
to the Pacific, to islands where seabirds were ingesting plastic,
mistaking it for food.
One of the most powerful scenes in the film is of a heroic little seabird
called a shearwater.
These birds, chicks, were turning up dead in their hundreds
on an island called Lord Howe Island.
And when we opened the stomachs of these birds,
we found them filled with plastic.
In one particular little chick,
we found 272 pieces of plastic.
That's equal to about 12 pizzas if you were to eat them all at once
and put them in your stomach.
Can you imagine the pain this animal was going through?
As we opened other chicks, we found a red bottle cap,
and I realized at that moment
that that bottle cap could have been a bottle cap I threw away years earlier
without understanding the consequences of my actions.
Now, if I'm a surfer, a diver and an ocean explorer,
and I didn't realize the consequences of my actions to the natural world
eight years ago,
how could I expect anyone else to understand theirs?
We needed awareness, and "A Plastic Ocean" would become the tool for that awareness.
Now, scientists told us
that we would dispose of between 8 and 12 million tons of plastic
into the world's oceans every year.
How on earth did we allow that to happen?
Well, the answer's simple: We were told plastic would make our lives easier.
We would no longer have to do the washing up.
It would keep our food fresher.
It would protect our consumer products like no other material before it.
And in many ways, it did just that.
But we were also told that plastic could be used just once and thrown away.
Think about that.
Plastic is the most durable product we have ever made.
How can the most durable product we've ever made be considered disposable?
The answer is, "It can't. It isn't."
Every piece of plastic ever made is still on the Earth unless it's been burned.
In the past decade,
we have produced more plastic than the entire century before that.
Fifteen years ago,
the United States' Center for Decease Control
released a study which showed that more than 92% of all Americans
contain chemicals related to plastic in their blood and their urine.
And more disturbing than that
was that children between the ages of 6 and 11 have twice as much.
Now, plastic chemical like phthalates and bisphenol As contain compounds
which have estrogenic activity, which mimic and sometimes block
the natural hormonal production of our bodies.
Recent research shows that these can cause endocrine disruptive decease,
cancer, diabetes, fertility and other reproductive issues.
But plastic has become an integral part of our society.
It's a very useful tool.
My cameras, my car, my computers - all contain plastic components.
But our habitual consumption of single-use plastic
is destroying life-giving environments.
It's killing other species, and it's polluting our food source.
So, what will happen if we don't stop production of plastic?
Well, as of 2015, we had produced, globally -
since plastic production has begun in the '50s -
8.3 billion tons of plastic.
8.3 billion tons.
6.3 billion tons of that has become waste,
and of that 6.3 billion tons of waste, only 9% has been recycled.
By 2050, our population will explode to more than 9.8 billion people,
and by then, we will be sending 12 billion tons of plastic to landfill
and to the environment.
It's staggering.
So, what's the solution?
Well, we need to stop our addiction to single-use plastic.
We need to move to a zero-waste society.
We need to change the very social and financial paradigms
that consider single-use plastic a useful resource.
We need a multifaceted approach to this problem,
with input from governments, retailers, manufacturers, consumers.
And we need to integrate new ideas,
like new legislation, circular economies
and cradle-to-grave responsibility for manufacturers and retailers.
And as consumers,
each one of us needs to be smarter about the choices we make.
We all need to rethink plastic.
So, how do we do that?
Well, we stop buying single-use plastics, to start with.
When I'm at home, and I have a drink, I don't need to use a straw.
So why do I need a straw when I go to a restaurant?
I don't.
Why would I spend up to 2,000% more buying water in a plastic bottle
when it costs me so much less to refill a steel container from the tap,
and it's quite often healthier?
It makes no sense.
Take a bag with you, a reusable bag, when you go shopping.
And when you get to the supermarket or the market, call the manager over.
At the checkout, unwrap all the plastic from all of those fruits and vegetables
that have been individually wrapped with this plastic stuff,
and give it to the manager,
back to the supermarket, back to the market,
and tell them to dispose of it properly
because you don't want to have the responsibility of taking it home
and having to do that anyway.
But more importantly, we need to go back.
We need to understand the systems that sustain life on planet Earth,
like the bird and the worm.
The bird wasn't committing murder.
They're part of a greater ecological, environmental system
which sustains life on Earth.
I know that now.
I didn't when I was five years of age.
Just like eight years ago,
I had no idea that by throwing my plastic products into the rubbish bin,
I was damaging the environment,
and I was polluting the food chain.
Awareness is a very powerful tool.
As I say in the film,
"With knowing comes caring, and with caring comes change."
And I'd like to leave you with this last thought:
Change starts with each and every one of you.
There is a need to change, and when that need arises, it's right now.
So, we all need to start change
for our future, for ourselves and for our children.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)